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Report: Digital Health and Rights – Reflections for Action

The report was drafted by Agathe Nguyen-Huynh, with contributions by Moe Shiojiri. Alice Baroni and Meg Davis edited the report.

This report summarises discussions at a workshop held at Fondation Brocher, Hermance, Switzerland in January 2023. The workshop gave our consortium a chance to step back, reflect on our first studies, and discuss learning from experience in 2021-22.

The Digital Health and Rights Project began in 2018, when the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria announced new partnerships with Mastercard and Google. Talking to civil society leaders on the Board of the Fund, it became clear that digitization and related private sector partnerships raised many questions we could not yet answer.

In January 2023, we all took a step back from two years of intense work to meet for two days at the beautiful Fondation Brocher in Hermance, Switzerland to delve into these questions:

What are human rights in the context of digitization of health, and what are the roles of diverse duty-bearers to respect, protect, promote and fulfil these rights?

What can we learn from ongoing efforts to ensure equitable access to medicines and health technologies, address human rights concerns about health data gathering (such as

molecular HIV surveillance), engage young people living with and affected by HIV, and ensure meaningful participation in global health governance by affected communities?

Given critiques of human rights from some decolonial and other advocates, what kind of human rights do we need in the digital future?